Thursday, June 16, 2011

The site of the CIA blocked by a computer attack

The official website of the CIA, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, has not been available for several hours Wednesday, June 15 evening. Hackers grouped under the name of Lulz Security (LulzSec) announced that they launched an attack against the site. Within minutes of the claim, posted on Twitter about midnight, access to the site was broken.

Later that evening, the connections were sporadic, before gradually returning to normal Thursday morning. According to preliminary information, the site seems to have been the victim of an attack called "denial of service", which consists of connections to saturate an Internet site to block access.

This does not allow access to files stored on a site or a computer network, but simply to block access. The denial of service does not require advanced knowledge in computing, but spend most frequent use of a network of computers controlled by attackers, known as "zombies." The group Lulz Security, unknown a month ago, has shown in recent weeks claiming attacks against groups Sony and Nintendo, as well as video game publisher Bethesda.

LulzSec also claimed responsibility for attacks against the United States Senate, the public television channel PBS, a major porn site and an organization working with the FBI, InfraGard. Contrary to the group Anonymous, which has claimed several attacks in the name of defending freedom of expression, says Security Lulz act "for fun".

After publishing the usernames and passwords porn site Pron. com, the group urged Internet users to use these codes to hack into Facebook accounts or e-mail addresses of users of the site, and reveal their relatives that they were subscribing to a pornography site. The identity of group members, which seems much smaller qu'Anonymous is still unknown.

A young man, described as a member of Lulz Security by police, was arrested in the U.S. last week, but the group denied its involvement in the organization. Article published in the edition dated 17.06.11